Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Jennifer Dubowsky, recently, gave a really good interview with MeetAdvisors, an online business advice show. The interview covers several topics that acupuncturists can take to heart when starting their business, starting a blog and growing a social media presence.

Jennifer is a well known acupuncturist and blogger in Chicago. She's written a book called Adventures in Chinese Medicine, which easily explains Traditional Chinese Medicine in a fun and friendly way. She also keeps a great blog and website at tcm007.com. And, she can be found on Twitter at @tcm007.

Below are some of the key points I took away from the interview which is embedded above.

Starting a small business

1) Low Overhead

“The lower you can keep your overhead, the better. Especially, when I started, but even now, I go by that, is you're going to be a lot slower. And if you sign some big 4 year lease, or you have a whole bunch of money or a big business loan, it's going to be really hard to meet that every month. Where as if you have low overhead, if you've got a slow month, you won't go out of business.”

2) Being Giving

“Being open, trying to come from a place of abundance rather than from a place of scarcity. I see that a lot with people in business, they feel that they need to grab or take rather than give.”

Starting a blog

1) Adding Your Personality

“Originally I wrote mainly about Chinese Medicine. I wrote a lot about research studies. And I think that stuff is very important when you can give people hard facts and statistics. But it can also be boring. And what I started to add into my blog was a little bit more of myself.”

2) Timely Topics

“For example, when Valentines Day was coming up, I wrote a post about Chinese herbs that can boost your kidney Qi which basically means boot your libido and your love life.”

3) Connecting with people

“I've also written a few post just about gratitude about thank you for coming to my blog and this is why and mentioning people.”

“Making connections with people who are like minded who will share your content and hopefully you like their content and it works together to both share.”

4) Continually Doing It

5) Social Media

“And then my blog, getting it out there on social media is huge. That makes a very very big difference in it being found. And then of course using keywords in the titles and the content.”

Growing Social Media Presence

1) Have Fun

“For me I really realized how much I enjoyed having some visuals.”

2) Build Relationships

“People don't realize you are making relationships. So, there are people like on twitter quote unquote I might have tweeted with or chatted with for a year and then they hit me up and say hey, "Can I come in for an appointment?" Or, "I really like that article" and they start sharing it.”

If you enjoyed the interview, you can thank Jennifer on Twitter at @tcm007. And I'm sure she'd appreciate it if you shared the video with your friends.